Baby Names Books

[Oliver Parkes]

Ifyou love to read, your favorite characters might inspire the perfect name for your baby. Baby names from books can come from canonical literary classics, such as Daisy and Ulysses, or contemporary works of fiction, such as Lyra and Lisbeth.

Along with Daisy and Lyra, other baby names from books in the US Top 1000 include Alice, Atticus, Emma, Harriet, Holden, Matilda, Milo, and Santiago. You may wish to consider last names as firsts of famous literary characters, such as Gatsby, Pevensie, Marlowe, and Cullen.

Also included on this list are invented literary names, including Renesmee (Twilight), Tinuviel (Lord of the Rings), Lilliet (Queen of the Night), and Katniss (The Hunger Games). Names invented for literary characters are not all modern inventions: Pamela was invented by Sir Philip Sidney for his eponymous novel in the 16th century, and Shakespeare is believed to have invented Olivia and Jessica.

I have 3 name books and I do still use them from time to time but I find the internet much faster, easier to find names and the information you are looking for and even pronunciations and other spellings of a name. I do like the books but they only have so much information. The internet has lots more to give you.

Are you expecting a bundle of joy or looking for the perfect baby shower gift? The Complete Book of Baby Names is your ultimate resource, providing a vast collection of names and inspiration to help you find the ideal name for your little one.

Lesley Bolton is a freelance writer and publishing professional with over six years of publishing experience. She is also the author of The Complete Book of Baby Names, The Everything Guide to Writing Children's Books, and The Everything Psychology Book. She lives in Bloomington, Indiana.

Right now we have two names we are thinking of choosing between, Leo Dominic and Peter Ambrose. I think we both like Dominic as a middle name for Peter too. Both names are ones that were not on our radar as possible baby boy names with our first pregnancy, and were not names we were considering when we found out this one is a boy.

After finding out, my husband had a dream that our son was 6 months old and we were still throwing out possible names to name him. One of those names was Leo. The morning after his dream, and before he even told me about it, the name Leo popped into my head.

It seems our naming style for a boy is a bit different than for a girl. Top names for a girl were Serafina, Evangeline, Magdalena, and Agnes. Agnes being the only one out of the ordinary in that list!

Stylistically, I am drawn to romantic, lyrical names for girls and regal, traditional names for boys. I care very little about how popular a name is and actually prefer, especially for girls, more unique names with strength, beauty and nickname options. I love when a name has deep religious significance, family and personal ties. My own name is Annelise Marie. I grew up with a unique name and nickname (Lissi) and loved it. I love that it calls to Saints Anne, Elizabeth and Mary. My own name has that unique but sounds familiar feel that Mariana and Maddalena have.

Mary has always been my guiding force. I feel profoundly called by her and close to her. Some of her titles I love are Our lady of the Mystical Rose, Our Lady of Guadalupe, Queen of Heaven, Queen of All Saints.

As soon as I saw Edmund in the list of names similar to Louisa I knew I had to include it on the list! It has that regal, traditional feel I think Annelise is looking for, with lots of nicknames options: Ed, Eddie, Ted, Teddy, Ned. St. Edmund Campion is great! Edmund Christopher is very handsome to me.

I also quickly went through the list of feast days and memorials from October 21 to November 10 at CatholicSaints.info, which is my favorite source for all that stuff. These were the ones that jumped out at me:

Happy Tuesday of the week of July 4th! Happy feast of lots of titles of Our Lady: Our Lady of the Garden, Our Lady of Madhu, Our Lady of Montallegro, Our Lady of the Grove, Our Lady of the Leśniw Spring, Our Lady of the Visitation, Our Lady of the Way of Leon, and Our Lady of Vaussivieres!

So far, we chose saint names that seem to suit our Sicilian last name pronounced SKIM-uh-ka. We like the Italian-ish sound to the names, and we like the kids to have an easy patron saint to turn to. To us, the boy names need to feel strong and the girl names need to feel pretty. ?

When I saw Rosa listed as a style match for Lucia, I immediately knew I wanted to include it in my list of suggestions! It also made me think of the longer Rosalia, which is a particularly Italian long form. The Rose names are always so lovely, and I love that they are Marian, too.

And those are my ideas! What do you all think? What name(s) would you suggest for a family with Cajun heritage and a love of Bl. Stanley Rother if their baby is a little brother for Eleanor, Mackie, Samuel, Marc Paul, and Rocco?

Like Joseph, Anthony, and Dominic, Vincent is a name that I consider to be one commonly used by families with Italian heritage, so I had to include it! Vince and Vinny are familiar nicknames, but I personally love the full Vincent. So handsome!

Sancta Nomina is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com. Start shopping!

Nowadays one finds books and online websites that help you to name babies. What are the earliest instances of these? I would assume that these would be in Europe, China or the Middle East, but if other geographies/cultures were using them, that would be acceptable too.

Now, it has been suggested that the Bible was a baby-name book. However, a baby-name book (BNB) can be defined as one which exists for people to name their babies out of. I think both the Old and New Testament have a larger mission than that.

What you will find for most of history are that people know what their local onomasticon is; that is, the list of what's considered "a name" in the local culture. Ours is extremely free-wheeling and fond of borrowing and invention of mere sounds: don't take it as a model of most onomastica. That is why we want BNB so we can find something new and different.

Take Anglo-Saxon. People had only one name, no regular use of eke-names, and to differentiate one Aethelwulf from another would start listing genealogy. Benno Seibs in Die Personennamen der Germanen [The Personal Names of the Germanic Peoples]. Wiesbaden: M. Sandig, 1970, lists all the roots and stems he could pull out of names of Teutons, Goths, Anglo-Saxons, Norse, &c. Anglo-Saxon parents would have these in their heads, both because they could cut and paste from all the names they had heard of, and because these were largely words in their language. Which didn't mean they could use anything. Some roots were male, some were female, and some were either. They knew which from common usage. They didn't need a book.

In Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, people didn't actually give a snap whether or not their name was "Christian." Those taking holy orders might take or be given a Latin name, but the use of those of established saints was a bit unusual, and certainly not required. These were the people establishing the list of saints' names: St. Patricius/Patrick, St. Hildegard, St. Ursula, and so on did not have an earlier saint of the name. When someone like Hrolf Ganger Christianized, he became Rollo, not in honour of a saint, but because that was the nearest Frankish/French name to Hrolf. All the Norsemen with him kept their Norse names, and he did, too, just not on the French rolls. You can track the cultural limits of Normandy by the place names that are based on some Viking name.

Over in Asia, they have more complicated names, but they still aren't picking baby names out of books. What they often do, is pick their own names when they are adults, or have it given by a near relative, but it's not off picklists. About the closest we get are Muslim names, where boys would be named abd-something, the something being one of the 99 titles of Allah. Starting with Abd-Allah, servant of the God. But there's Abd-al-Fattah, the servant of the Revealer, and ninety-some more.

The picklists first show up in Europe at the Reformation. Using a saint's name for your child was one way to mark it as not being in one of those Protestant groups that didn't believe in saints. Of course, a lot still did, like the Church of England. Even those Puritan names we all love, like Prudence, Temperance, Wait-still, and Conquer-all, were being invented, not picked off a list. Some Protestants, to name a baby, opened a Bible at random and blindly put down a finger. The first name as they ran down the column went to the baby. This meant babies got place names like Sharon or got one normally associated with the other sex, because many of these people couldn't read the surrounding text to get the context.

We start approaching the baby-name books in the 1600s when a few books record commonly known names, primarily for the benefit of law clerks, who had to be able to render them in Latin (1677, The Compleat Clerk, and so on.). However, Camden, in Remaines Concerning Britain (1605), gives us an entirely new attitude, a sense of history, and that the world will change. He records the names in common use, and such oddities as the minorities using family names as baptismal names, or giving children more than one baptismal name, for future ages who would not otherwise know what his culture did.

Before the 1800s, no one in European cultures much cared what their names "meant": names were names. A few might know because a line in the Bible remarks on it, but no one named a zillion single-birth sons Thomas/Toms &c., because it meant "a twin." It was just one of the common names (and we're still using it as just a name).

But then came the 1800s, with the rise of philology and etymology as sciences. Etymologists originally would pick apart names because ancient words are buried in them that might not survive elsewhere. In many ancient and forgotten languages, the first words they could make out were the proper names. In some languages, like Visigothic, names are all we have left.

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